After Alexander Ankvab has claimed victory in the Abkhaz vote, his rival candidate, Raul Khajimba has claimed electoral violations and called on the breakaway region's central election commission (CEC) not to hurry with announcing results.

"This election has again showed that the process of cheating continues and what we see in additional voters list confirms it," Khajimba was quoted by RFE/RL's Russian-language service, Ekho Kavkaza, as saying while speaking with supporters in his campaign office in Sokhumi.

Khajimba, who says he is a runner up in the August 26 snap presidential elections, has long been expressing concerns about voter list and in particularly about election day voter registration. Together with the third candidate, Sergey Shamba, he made a joint appeal to the breakaway region's parliament asking to limit number of voters registered on the election day at each precinct.

"We will be working to count all the figures. We have already demanded from CEC not to announce election results. Unless a relevant work is done, unless we look into how those additional lists in the precincts were compiled, we can not say that someone has won. Elections can only be declared valid after ascertaining that everything is in line with the law," Khajimba said.

Khajimba hopes the race will go into a runoff between him and Ankvab. Earlier he told Russian news agency, RIA Novosti, that although Ankvab was leading in the election, he had no enough vote to win the race in the first round and the runoff was likely between him and Ankvab.

Meanwhile, Nugzar Ashuba, parliamentary speaker of the breakaway region, who is now an acting president, told Interfax news agency, that Ankvab received more than 50% of votes and "there will be no second round."